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Ex-President of Liberia Aided War Crimes, Court Rules

A war victim watched the trial of Charles G. Taylor on a television screen at the Special Court in Freetown, Sierra Leone, on Thursday. Credit
Issouf Sanogo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

THE HAGUE — Charles G. Taylor, the former president of Liberia and once a powerful warlord, was convicted by an international tribunal on Thursday of arming, supporting and guiding a brutal rebel movement that committed mass atrocities in Sierra Leone during its civil war in the 1990s. He is the first head of state to be convicted by an international court since the Nuremberg trials after World War II.

After 13 months of deliberation, a panel of three judges from Ireland, Samoa and Uganda found Mr. Taylor guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder, rape, slavery and the use of child soldiers. They said he had helped plan the capture of diamond mines and the invasion of Freetown, the capital. But the prosecution failed to prove that Mr. Taylor had directly commanded the rebels responsible for the atrocities, the judges said.

The conflict in Sierra Leone became notorious for its gruesome tactics, including the calculated mutilation of thousands of civilians, the widespread use of drugged children and the mining of diamonds to pay for guns and ammunition. A sinister rebel vocabulary pointed to the horrors: applying “a smile” meant cutting off the upper and lower lips of a victim, giving “long sleeves” meant hacking off the hands, and giving “short sleeves” meant cutting the arm above the elbow.

Ten years after the war ended, Sierra Leone is still struggling to rebuild. An estimated 50,000 people died, while countless others fled the country or took refuge in camps. A large portion of the nation’s young missed their educations. Unemployment, particularly among the young men who emerged from the war with few skills, is crushing. Electricity is scant, even in the capital. The country has returned to democracy, but many educated Sierra Leoneans remain abroad, literacy is low and some industries, like mining iron ore, are just starting up again.

“He is the one who started this,” Osman Turay, one of several amputees playing soccer on crutches in the concrete shell of an unfinished building in Freetown, said of Mr. Taylor after the verdict.

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Credit
The New York Times

Prosecutors said Mr. Taylor’s part in the devastation was motivated not by ideology, but by a quest for power and money — “pure avarice,” in the words of David M. Crane, the American prosecutor who indicted him in 2003. Rebels provided Mr. Taylor with “a continuous supply” of diamonds, often in exchange for arms and ammunition, the court found. The war, and the money siphoned off from his own government, allowed him to send millions of dollars to offshore companies, prosecutors said.

Yet investigators never unraveled the web hiding this presumed fortune, and Mr. Taylor pleaded penury, leaving the court to foot the bill for his defense, which cost $100,000 per month in lawyers, staff and rent.

Still, the trial has brought “a sense of relief,” said Ibrahim Tommy, who leads the Center for Accountability and Rule of Law, a human rights group in Freetown. “I’m not sure it will bring closure to the victims,” Mr. Tommy said, but the trial was “a genuine effort to ensure accountability for the crimes in Sierra Leone.”

The tribunal, called the Special Court for Sierra Leone, has already sentenced eight other leading members of different forces and rebel groups. Mr. Taylor, who has maintained his innocence, is scheduled to be sentenced on May 30. There is no death penalty in international criminal law, and any prison term would be served behind British bars.

The fighting for control over one of the world’s poorest regions also involved Liberia, where many more died, and threatened to spill over into neighboring Guinea and Ivory Coast. But only crimes in Sierra Leone between 1996 and 2002 are within the court’s mandate, and Mr. Taylor is the special court’s last defendant. His trial was moved to the Netherlands for fear of causing unrest in West Africa, where he still has followers.

Not since Karl Dönitz, the German admiral who briefly succeeded Hitler upon his death, was tried and sentenced by the International Military Tribunal has a head of state been convicted by an international court.

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Charles Taylor, seen in 1990 on the outskirts of Monrovia, led the rebel National Patriotic Front of Liberia before assuming the country's presidency.Credit
Pascal Guyot/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

During Mr. Taylor’s lengthy trial, which began in 2006, the judges heard testimony from 115 witnesses. Before the formally robed court officers, they spoke of slave labor in captured diamond mines, rape, severed heads displayed on stakes to terrorize people, and lines of captured villagers, waiting to have their limbs hacked off.

There were many chilling moments, as witnesses described the barbarism of the rebels.

Mustapha Mansary, a villager, was twice asked by a defense lawyer if he could read and write English, until he held up his two bandaged stumps.

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Witness 064, a rape victim, described the day rebels came to her village. With axes, they cut up and decapitated many adults and children as she was held indoors. The gang leader then ordered her to go outside to look for her family. The severed heads of her relatives were put in a sack dripping with blood, including the heads of her two children.

“They gave me the heads to carry,” she said. She couldn’t, she told the court.

But prosecutors struggled with a legal puzzle of how to link such atrocities to Mr. Taylor. There was no paper trail showing orders. He was not at the scene of the crimes, and they were not committed by Liberia’s army, which was under his command.

To build their case, prosecutors used radio and telephone intercepts and brought in radio operators who had connected Mr. Taylor’s residence in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, to the rebels in Sierra Leone. People close to Mr. Taylor, his head of security, bodyguards and other associates, some of them relocated abroad as protected witnesses, testified about arms and ammunition shipments for the rebels and about seeing raw diamonds arriving as payment.

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TimesCast | Charles Taylor Convicted

Charles G. Taylor, the former president of Liberia and a once-powerful warlord, was convicted by an international tribunal for war crimes.

Bank records were displayed in court, showing how tax payments and other government income moved into Mr. Taylor’s accounts, ostensibly to pay for the war effort, or to pocket for himself. Defense lawyers dismissed much of the evidence as hearsay. And they repeatedly said the trial was a political exercise by Western countries that wanted to keep Mr. Taylor out of West Africa.

The defense presented as evidence two secret diplomatic cables from 2009, part of the cache revealed by WikiLeaks, in which American diplomats wrote about Mr. Taylor. One, dated March 2009, quoted the American ambassador to Liberia as saying that “the best we can do for Liberia is to see that Charles Taylor is put away for a long time.”

The most important defense witness was Mr. Taylor himself. Eloquent and respectful of the court, he managed to stay for almost seven months on the witness stand, giving his version of his life and his role as a peacemaker, without being cut off by the judges during his many digressions. He told the court that he had been trained in Libya and had once received money from Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi for “medical expenses.” While he was in a Massachusetts jail, awaiting extradition on charges of embezzling $900,000 of Liberian government money, he said, he did not escape, but was let out with the help of the C.I.A.

Mr. Taylor said he would “never, ever” have permitted atrocities. The many tales from his life, replete with details of his career as a rebel, a prisoner, a negotiator and a president, were followed by a large radio audience at home in Liberia and drove up his popularity.

Lawyers said that judges seemed to be bending over backward to appear fair. “Taylor had every day in court he could have wished for,” said Stephen J. Rapp, a former prosecutor at the court and now a United States ambassador for war crimes issues.

At the start of the two-hour hearing, Mr. Taylor waved and smiled at some of his relatives in the public gallery, but he left looking somber. Charen Taylor, one of his daughters, said: “Of course I’m not happy, but we have to be optimistic about the appeal. It’s been a very long process.”

A version of this article appears in print on April 27, 2012, on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Liberian Ex-Leader Convicted for Role in Sierra Leone War Atrocities. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe